IncongruousGoat

Nothing is even close. KSP's O/F ratio (oxidizer to fuel) is ~1.2. After doing some digging, the closest real-world figure I can find to that number is Titan II's O/F ratio, which is 1.9. The reasons why KSP's O/F ratio is unrealistic are complicated and involve a non-trivial amount of chemistry and physics, and also are 100% off-topic, so that's all I'm going to say about it here.

Normally I'm not huge about Crosby, Stills, & Nash, but this got seriously stuck in my head a few days ago:

The problem here is that the Shuttle's LH2/LOX propellant combination is a heck of a lot less tense than KSP's Lf/Ox. A proportionally-sized Shuttle tank in KSP would be way too heavy, and you'd end up needing to mount oversized engines on the orbiter (or doing something more resembling Energia/Buran) to get the T/W ratio above 1. Which would spoil the perfect replica.

Here's a 77 point multi-launch entry (because I haven't seen any multi-launch entries yet): https://imgur.com/a/x1QH3vX This is a somewhat rejiggered version of a craft I designed for a nano-diamond caveman run, redesigned to widen the margins, remove unnecessary science, and make it not horrible to fly. 100-2*T2-2*T3-2*T4-T5=77 points. As I read the rules, I don't lose any points for stranding Jeb since he wasn't the Kerbal who went to the Mun. And in any case, he's in LKO and with the parts I have unlocked it's trivial to launch a Stayputnik rocket to go nudge his capsule onto a re-entry trajectory. Unfortunately, the dock-a-drop-tank-to-it approach isn't going to result in any improvement in max score, since the docking ports are in a T5 node. But, it was fun to fly, and that's good enough for me.

Is this accurate, though? I was under the impression that bacteria are A: much hardier than we are when it comes to radiation, and B: so prolific that any losses in population caused by radiation will be quickly replaced. And as for bringing them over, isn't it enough to just bring a few crates of dirt?

Not really. They're both variants of the AJ-10, but the Apollo SM engine had something like 90 kN of thrust, while the Shuttle's OMS engines had something more like 25 kN each. The designs were conceptually very similar, but the sheer difference in thrust means that they (very probably) had no components in common.

What @GRS said. Planet packs are purely optional here; as long as you land on all the stock bodies (in stock locations) you've completed the challenge. Planet packs just add flair to the submission.

When you've finished the mission, it would be very helpful if you could post a list of all the planet packs whose planets you visited so I can put them in the hall of fame entry.

@GRS I'm going to hold off on properly judging your submission until after you've returned the crew to Kerbin. Getting back home safe is still a part of the challenge. Unofficially, however... I like it. Seriously, you did a really good job, especially with the lander design.

The mistake that really gets me is when movies (haven't seen it in a show yet, but I don't really watch shows so YMMV) get the in-atmo plume wrong. Specifically, use of a dense, cloudy, off-white solid-fuel plume where it just isn't even vaguely appropriate. The Martian did it with the MAV (which is either hydrolox or methalox based on ISRU chemistry), but the worst offender I can think of is Hidden Figures, which mixed CGI footage with real historic launch footage for the launch of Mercury-Redstone 3. In the historic footage you can see the largely transparent ethanol-LOX plume clear as day. In the CGI? Big, cloudy, off-white, <insert profanity of choice here> SRB exhaust. I personally blame the Shuttle for ruining several generations' view of what a rocket launch looks like, but that may just be my overall dislike of the Shuttle leaking over.

As long as you get all the stock planets and moons, I don't care where else you go or when you go there.

Surprisingly, no. Only the first failure was due to the flight computer (even then, only partly; the first stage was also on fire), and the failure mode in that case was a lot more complicated than the computer shutting down the wrong engine (which didn't happen). Basically, the electrical engineering was really shoddy and caused the computer to believe a whole bunch of things that weren't true, and also the booster was on fire. The second failure was caused by Engine #8 exploding (this is the one that fell back onto the pad), the third was an uncontrolled roll due to funky aerodynamics at the base of the rocket that led to gimbal lock, and the fourth was caused by a fire that started after several fuel lines ruptured from a hydraulic shockwave after the 6 center engines were shut down to reduce Max-Q. And also an engine exploded.

7 is unlikely due to physics reasons; you'd have to give Minmus's surface a very (unrealistically) high coefficient of friction to make this work. Though I would like to see different coefficients of friction for different bodies, with the icier planets and moons being more slippery than the rocky ones. 8 is also unlikely, just because it'd be hard to develop at this late stage of the game. It's hard to see a way for Kerbals to react to ragdolling that is both specific enough that it's possible to develop, and also not so situational that it's useless. I really like the rest of the suggestions though. 1 would come especially handy in RSS/Principia saves, where high time warp combined with intensive physics calculations makes the game slow to a crawl once you've got more than a couple vessels in orbit. It's very hard to stop time warp with any level of precision when the game is running at less than 1 frame per second.

Like the clickety-clack of a train on a track, it's got clicking to spare...

For step 3 (and all future ship-Kerbal rendezvous) I think it makes more sense to rendezvous MIKE with Jeb and not the other way around, considering just how much jetpack RCS fuel a Kerbal burns doing anything. I'm sure our resident expert ladder rider @dvader has more to say on the matter, since he's the one who pioneered long-distance ladder trips in the first place. Oh, and you should probably add a note to jettison the docking tug somewhere around step 1 or step 4, because otherwise we'll forget and end up dragging that thing all the way to Jool. I know I'd forget, anyways. Other than that it looks good to me.

@ManEatingApe I... haven't really been extensively documenting my launches so far. I figured that rendezvous and docking was a common enough thing that it would be fine. Should I go back and re-do them? UPDATE: KILO has been launched and docked to MIKE. With screenshots this time! Link here: https://imgur.com/a/hU6aFug I also made some changes to the KILO launch vehicle to give it better TWR at launch (basically, I swapped the fins out for a fairing and used the extra parts for a pair of spark engines/nosecones on the booster). A PR has been made with the changes.

As long as you didn't launch anything from Kerbin after landing on the Mun, you're in the clear. What order you do the landings, and how many times you land in a given place, doesn't matter so long as you get at least one landing on every body.

I'll take the last slot, if no one else desperately wants it.

@GRS I am, of course, excited to see you still plugging away at this. That said, you may want to make a separate thread for the mission and then post a link to it here when you're done.

There are a bunch of probe cores on MIKE, but they might all be set to hibernate to preserve power. Might want to check them to see what state they're in. Though, if you've got fine-grained attitude control that probably isn't it...

Aero covers! Looking at the video, the covers are just more sheets of stainless with some ribbing welded to the convex side, probably for support and to make them easier to weld to the fuselage. EDIT: On the subject of the header tanks, I had a thought as to why they might be mounted in the nosecone. This prototype isn't going to fly with payload (it's not equipped to), which means that on ascent the center of mass is going to be substantially further back than it would be on an actual launch, which leads me to think that the header tanks were put in the nose (in part) to simulate the mass distribution you'd see when launching with payload. Admittedly, it doesn't work quite so well on descent, but still.

Probably not. If there's money to be made in carbon capture, you can bet that we'll see dedicated carbon capture companies set up, who will be far better equipped to do it in the most optimal manner possible. Methane production is almost certainly not the best way to do it, just because of storage concerns.

Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry; I took this way too personally. I still don't like it, but I think I can live with it being a toggle, or a game mode, or similar.

Maybe. But a feature like this would be a hard no-sell for me (as in, it would be reason enough for me not to buy KSP 2), and so I argue against it. KSP has been a big part of making me the person I am today. As such, I have strong opinions about it, and one of those opinions is that the open nature of the sandbox is sacrosanct. The game should not ever tell you what to do, even if that particular feature is behind a toggle. It's why I said it would make an excellent mod. I'm not against people putting it in their game if they want to - I just don't want it in the copy of KSP2 that ends up on my hard drive. Actually, it probably should be made into a mod. There's clearly demand, and this is the kind of thing that mods are for - stuff that doesn't belong in the stock game for one reason or another, but that a subset of players want.

Making it toggle-able addresses points 2 and 3, but it doesn't do anything about point 1. It's still a fixed mission marring the otherwise open sandbox. Giving us a toggle is the equivalent of throwing a tarp over an ugly, rusted old car. The car is still there (and shouldn't be), even if you can't see it because it's under a tarp. I'm not trying to argue that I wouldn't want it in my game - I'm arguing that it shouldn't be in anyone's game by default, because fixed goals are not what KSP is about. It's great material for a mod, though.